


pandora's darling

by arisfocis



Category: Dream SMP (Video Blogging RPF), Minecraft (Video Game)
Genre: Angst, Canon Compliant, Character Study, Gen, Mentioned Wilbur Soot, Pandora's Vault Prison, Purple Prose, dream has a god complex whats new
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-01
Updated: 2021-03-01
Packaged: 2021-03-14 06:16:08
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,127
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29787702
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/arisfocis/pseuds/arisfocis
Summary: It goes like this:Dream is a god. Dream is a villain. Dream does not respect challengers.Tommy is naive. Tommy is a child. Tommy does not know better.It goes like this:A bell tolls: hope is dead, hope is dead, hope is dead, and a darker dawn rises.
Comments: 11
Kudos: 30





	pandora's darling

Humanity weeps tonight.

It goes like this:

Dream is a god. Dream is a villain. Dream does not respect challengers.

Tommy is naive. Tommy is a child. Tommy does not know better.

It goes like this:

Tommy is hopeful. This world is healing, this world is growing. This world is broken but he is sealing it’s cracks with gold. 

He _believes_ , so deeply, so fiercely. His world is carved in black and white, in good and evil, with-him and without-him. 

He is at home, now, and he resides among his friends. He is searching for the way forward, he is rewriting his fate, he is true to his words and his promises and his beliefs. He is abandoning his past to the wolves, leaving it to rot and fester and die _alone, alone alone._

It goes like this:

Hope is not all good. Hope does not deal in perfection and in absolutes.

Hope deals in grey areas and in ritual, rests in the spaces between breaths and in the hands of it’s ruler. 

Hope is only as powerful as it’s wielder, only moves in the way that its master wishes, only works to the degree that it is ordered.

It goes like this:

Tommy faces the sunshine, sitting on a rooftop, and thinks about his losses. 

Tommy misses Wilbur.

 _Wilbur is his Achilles’ heel,_ he muses, looking out on New L’manburg. 

Tommy knows — he would go to the ends of the world and back for this part of his past. He hates the rest of it, he _does_ , bitter and venomous and stinging, but Wilbur — Wilbur was his friend. 

He knows that the others know this, too, that Tommy would die and come back before he gives up on Wilbur — he hasn’t made any efforts towards disguising this fact. 

He is predictable, rote, expected, in his words, in his beliefs, in his actions. When he spares Dream, the world is not surprised, and the world is not surprised when he throws him in prison either. \

 _It’s ironic,_ he thinks. _Dream being thrown in prison. The evil forced back into Pandora’s box._

There is power surging through Tommy’s veins and today, he is capable of anything.

(Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.)

Tommy thinks today is the day, the day to leave it all behind. Lock up his past and throw away the key, like he’s a child once again, like he never had to grow beyond his years, like he never had to accommodate the push and pull of power and revolution and war.

Tommy will visit Dream today, and it will be the last time they see one another.

It goes like this:

This world does not deal in absolutes in the way that anyone expects.

It goes like this:

Tommy is trapped.

Tommy is trapped in this god-forsaken obsidian room with the man who manipulated him.

 _God-forsaken,_ Tommy snorts. 

There is a god here. He is not a benevolent god, no — but he is a god nonetheless, and he is the one who has orchestrated this mess. He is the one who played Tommy and Eret and Schlatt and Wilbur and every other goddamned person on this server like he was a grandmaster and they were his pawns.

 _Dream is a god of the worst fucking kind,_ Tommy thinks, _all-powerful and meddling. Little bastard._

Tommy had screamed when he first got trapped. Desperately, viscous, tangible fear coating his voice like honey, like venom. Screamed for anyone who would listen — for Sam, at first, when the fear was stinging fresh like a burn off a hot stove, and then for Philza and for Tubbo and for Wilbur, when it had subsided into the low, dark flames it is now.

Tommy had screamed until he cried, and then cried until he lost his voice, and Dream had watched, unfeeling, unfazed, through it all. 

He had screamed at Dream, too — called him every insult that he knew and created more, blamed him for the past and for his future, threw every last measly possession of his into the lava — and Dream had sat and smiled, placatingly, patronizingly, at Tommy.

Tommy — Tommy is so, so scared.

It goes like this:

This world does not deal in second chances. There is one currency, and one currency only — violence.

This world deals in absolutes — _whens,_ not _ifs_ and _maybes. When_ Dream gets out. _When_ Tubbo dies. _When_ Ranboo comes. 

Violence for violence is the rule of beasts, an eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind, and the residents of the server know this — they know this, too intimately, and yet time and time again, they become the beasts, they leave themselves blind, oblivious, uncaring.

Tommy is guilty of this, too, he is. He spits uncaring words at everyone around him, screams like a child — _he is a child —_ at the people he left behind, the people who left him behind. He screams until there is nothing else left to say and then he screams some more, for the hell of it, because everything’s all gone to shit, anyways. There is a rift tearing it’s way through him, unfixable, unbridgeable. 

Tommy is hopeful. Tommy is vengeful. 

It goes like this:

Tommy yells at Dream, as he is wont to do — except this time, Dream yells back. Voice filled with rage, and for the first time in a long time, Tommy feels real, true fear.

He had felt scared before, too, of course — but even trapped in obsidian, even hearing the TNT go off, even surrounded by lava, Tommy was hopeful. He held on the the fragile little shred of hope that everything _would_ be fine, that he would get out no worse for wear, the Dream would _stay_ in the vault even after he got himself out.

Dream is yelling back.

Dream is yelling back, matching Tommy word for word, and Tommy feels _rage._ Tommy raises his voice, screams louder, on par with Dream, and he feels _powerful._

Like a god, in his own right.

(Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.)

And so Tommy yells, accuses Dream of the things he suspected and knew all along — calls out his lies, his manipulation, his trickery. Pokes holes into the narrative Dream has woven and feels a _thrill_ every time Dream responds in kind. With every attack Dream gets in, Tommy has another grievance to hurl at Dream, bitter and abandoned and nothing to lose — step for step, hit for hit, word for word.

Tommy is flame and destruction and hate and bitterness, and— 

Tommy is dead.

( _You do not challenge the god of this world and escape unscathed.)_

It goes like this:

A bell tolls: _hope is dead, hope is dead, hope is dead,_ and a darker dawn rises.

**Author's Note:**

> JESUS CHRIST i have So Much Brainrot. this is the fastest i've ever finished a piece
> 
> if my kpop oomfs made it this far: hey.... im back............ in a new fandom..................
> 
> and for the rest of y'all: [shakes can] its ur local validation gremlin and she craves kudos (and comments) (also this is my first fic here. i would Really Like Feedback)
> 
> [tumblr](https://arisfocis.tumblr.com)  
> [twitter](https://twitter.com/AR1SFOC1S)


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